Olivia Kiernan Books in Order

If you want the Frankie Sheehan story from the start: Too Close to Breathe → The Killer in Me → If Looks Could Kill → The Murder Box
If you want her standalone psychological thriller: The End of Us
If you like folklore, archaeology, and Gothic suspense: Dawn Solstice
If you want the quickest sample of her crime writing: Too Close to Breathe

Olivia Kiernan grew up in County Meath, near Kells, in the Irish countryside, one of six children. She has said that journaling and writing were always part of her life, and that Irish storytelling and love of words shaped her early on. That mix of rural memory and sharp attention to people still shows up in her fiction, even when the books move through city streets and crime scenes.

She did not take a straight road into publishing.

After school she studied anatomy and physiology, then moved to Wales at 19 to train as a chiropractor. Later she worked near Oxford as a chiropractor for about 12 years. During those years she kept writing in the evenings after work and also completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Sussex. It is a very practical backstory for a crime writer, the kind that leaves you with a feel for bodies, stress, and the small details people miss.

The writing kept tugging at her sleeve.

The big turning point came after her daughter was born. Kiernan has said she began writing what became Too Close to Breathe when her daughter was eight months old, working at night while the baby slept. She also wrote a large part of that first draft during National Novel Writing Month in 2015. After letting the manuscript sit on her hard drive for a while, she sent it to agents, signed quickly, and saw the book published in 2018. After that, she moved into writing full-time.

That book introduced Frankie Sheehan, a Dublin detective who returns to work after a violent attack and walks straight into a case that looks like suicide but is not. Readers who stay with the series usually do so for Frankie as much as the plots. The Killer in Me, If Looks Could Kill, and The Murder Box all build on that same mix of police work, emotional fallout, and the uneasy feeling that every neat surface is hiding something ugly underneath.

Kiernan's fiction tends to circle a few recurring ideas: secrecy, public masks, private damage, and the long aftershock of violence. She likes cases where the victim has a hidden life, families have old fault lines, and the setting carries pressure of its own. Dublin matters in the Frankie Sheehan novels. So do the Wicklow mountains, coastal towns, and the quieter suburbs where bad things can sit behind tidy doors.

She is not limited to one lane, though. Her earlier novel Dawn Solstice leans into archaeology, folklore, and a more Gothic kind of suspense, while The End of Us shifts into dark domestic thriller territory and follows a man sliding into moral disaster. That range makes sense. Even when the setup changes, Kiernan seems most interested in what people do when fear, shame, money, love, or self-preservation start calling the shots.

These days she lives in the UK and writes full-time. In interviews she has talked about fitting her work around ordinary life, early starts, school hours, walks with the dogs, and the steady routine that books require. It is a grounded picture, which feels right. Her novels may deal in murder, secrets, and psychological strain, but the path that got her there was built the slow way, page by page.